Scum Files: Apple Tells App Developers To Shut Up

And now Apple joins the hallowed halls of the Homotron Scum Files with their recent bone-headed move: Apple has sent out a notice to all iPhone App developers telling them that any rejection letters they receive are covered under NDA, effectively telling them to shut up under threat of legal action.

Apple's guidelines for rejecting applications from the iPhone App Store have recently come under criticism following the denial of several apps due to questionable reasons. The rejections letters from Apple explaining the reasons for denial were published by the app developers, causing uproar among the developer community.

Some recent rejected applications and the reason they were rejected:

• Podcaster: rejected for "duplicating iTunes functionality." The application allowed the downloading of podcasts directly on the iPhone.
• MailWrangler: rejected for duplicating the built-in Mail "without providing sufficient differentiation or added functionality."
• Pull My Finger: rejected for providing "limited functionality."

The outrage comes from the fact that the reasons for rejection are not made clear in the guidelines for application development for the iPhone, and the applications are rejected after developers have spent the time to program the app and submit it to Apple for final approval, basically telling developers "thanks for wasting your time; you're not worthy."

By extending the onerous and infamous iPhone developer NDA to the rejection letters, Apple is gagging developers to silence criticism of its rejection policies.

The developer NDA already stiffles application development on the iPhone by preventing app developers from even talking to each other to share programming tips and tricks (a common practice among developers on any platform.) I can't share what I've learned from playing around with the iPhone API, and I can't learn from others who have solved issues I'm running into. This means that every single developer who wants to make an application for the iPhone has to reinvent the wheel every time and learn all the idiosyncrasies of the platform by themselves, with no way to seek help from others.

And now, even after you've spent the time figuring out how to program for the iPhone, all the time spent developing your application could be thrown out the window by an arbitrary rejection decision that can now never be shared.

Bad Apple. You've earned an entry into the Homotron Scum Files.

Apple Extends Non-Disclosure to App Store Rejection Letters [MacRumors]